21 1 Révolutions de Constantinople France and the Ottoman World in the Age of Revolutions ALI YAYCIOĞLU To the Gezi Parkı protestors [Istanbul, May 31, 2013] There are no states that have not been subject to great revolutions. —Antoine Futerière, 1690 In his book Révolutions de Constantinople (1819), Antoine Juchereau de Saint-Denis (1778–1842), a French émigré and military engineer employed by the Ottoman state as an expert in fortification and artil- lery, narrated the stormy events that he observed in the Ottoman capital in 1807 and 1808. During three révolutions, as Juchereau defined them, two sultans were deposed and executed, several statesmen were beheaded, poisoned, or lynched, and thousands of ordinary Ottoman men and women became victims of violence and terror. Perhaps more important, Juchereau maintained, these revolutions resulted from a battle between the reform program of the New Order—a military and administrative reorganization agenda under the Ottoman sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807)—and the general public, led by the guards of the old